Peavey DPM SP, DPM SX

This is an article culled from archive material, circa 1997.

The DPM SP was the first sampler which addressed all of my criticisms with previous products. It was also one of the first batch of Peavey's products aimed at the professional synth/keyboard market. The SP is expandable with standard SIMMs (up to 32MB), can drive conventional cheap SCSI hard disks, and allows external graphical wave editing via SCSI transfer. And it was cheaper than comparable models at the time of launch.

The voice architecture is respectable (16 voices into two stereo outputs, with dynamic voice allocation, voice reserve and exclusion), let down only by weak filtering (lowpass only, no resonance). The MIDI implementation is decent, although system exclusive transfer and editing only arrived with version 1.4 of the operating system. The file system in particular is nicely designed, with the ability to load voice components from other banks, with checksumming used to avoid duplication. Samples can be transferred using SMDI (SCSI MIDI Data Exchange), a "standard" for encapsulating MIDI over SCSI which only Kurzweil has chosen to implement as well, on its K2000 series. I used a DPM SP for about a year, editing samples over SCSI with Passport Designs' Alchemy on an Apple PowerBook 170, and found it easy and convenient.

The DPM SX is a dedicated sampling front-end for the DPM SP (which cannot sample by itself). Since the SX supports SMDI and MIDI Sample Dump Standard, it is conceivably of use to owners of other sample-based instruments. The SX has its own sample RAM, with a maximum of (I believe) 16MB. However, it only samples in mono; the later SX II will sample in stereo, and will even sample directly into a SP's RAM using SCSI.

There has been talk for at least a year of an SP Plus sampler with improved features, including resonant filters. I have not seen one yet.